Ask a manager: Our callers hate voicemail

[purlewe]

#3 in this grouping: https://www.askamanager.org/2022/05/job-candidates-keep-ghosting-us-coworkers-sharing-a-house-and-more.html

I answer the main phone line for our division. I’ve noticed that no one wants to leave voicemails anymore. I’ll transfer the line to someone and the person will just call back to tell me they got voicemail. Okay? I tell them to leave a message and they fight me on it. They will call back multiple times instead of just leaving a voicemail. This isn’t just one or two people. This is a majority of the callers I get. Even when I let people know they might get voicemail and just to leave one (we are a smaller division with only 1-2 people handling each program) they still call back and harass me about getting a voicemail. I think they either want me to hunt the person down or make them magically appear out of thin air. Most of the time they just call back and tell me that they got a voicemail and are upset about it. I normally just say, “Well, then the best thing to do is to leave them a message and they’ll get back to you.”Then I get some more huffs and puffs and I transfer them right back to the line. Is this just how people are now or can I use different language? I sometimes offer to take a message for people and will just email the person to call them back, but I don’t like doing that because it makes me feel like I’m people’s personal assistant and that’s not the case. Yeah, people do not like voicemail anymore! It’s super interesting. A lot of people have stopped using it entirely in their personal lives, instead assuming the other person will see the missed call from them and call back, or they’ll text instead, or they’ve almost entirely cut out phone calls in their non-work life anyway so voicemail feels like a strange relic of the past. But whether or not people like it, voicemail is still very much a normal business tool — in most offices, anyway.

 

Is it possible that people think that if you take the message for them, they’ll be more likely to get a call back? A lot of people don’t listen to their voicemail as much as they used to, even at work, and it’s possible that these callers know from experience that their chances of a return call anytime soon are low. If it’s definitely not your job to pass messages on, another option would be to say, “I can give you her email address if you’d like to try emailing instead.” (And maybe pass on to someone with some power to address it that people need to deal with their voicemail messages more often.)

But if none of that solves it and people just want to tell you how much they dislike voicemail, all you can really do is what you’ve been doing. You could try adding, “I know she checks voicemail regularly so she should get back to you soon” and that might be the reassurance they need … but obviously only say that if you know it to be true.

Comments

[dine]

I'm at the front desk at my building, and get this often too. even if I say upfront that I'm not positive X is in the building, but leave a message on VM, a lot of the time the person calls back. I also wonder what they expect me to do - I won't take messages from callers, as I might not see the person come into the building, and most of our employees can check messages from home if they're not coming in for a few days.

(the other big phone-related hassle is when a caller returns a call without knowing who called them, because they just hit redial instead of listening to the message. even with some folks working from home, there are too many people for me to magically guess who might have called)